"We're dealing with an organization that has a couple hundred human members, tops," Earl said. "And most of them are going to be fanatics rather than professionals in this exalted order of assholes. Their leader's powers are useless here, so we should be relatively safe from a direct assault. Unless he sends his other non-undead monsters against us, and if that happens, we'll just button up and deal with them. In the meantime we need to prepare for any other threats he comes up with. None of you will breathe a word of this to anyone outside of this room. We'll come up with a plan for this Condition." He began to rattle off duties. "Everyone, keep an eye on Franks. I don't trust him. Lee, see what you can find out about these ogre things from the archives. Julie, Dorcas, I want you to contact all the team leads, give them a brief rundown about this cult and see if any of them can scare up any local intel. Milo, Trip, Holly, go see the elves, check if they've had any dealings with them."
Holly groaned out loud.
"I really do know them better than anybody, I guess." Milo squinted toward me. "My wife's about to have a baby, and if I'm off talking to trailer park elves about you when she goes into labor with my first child, I'm holding you personally responsible."
I nodded slowly, not really sure how I was going to help with that.
Earl continued. "Esmeralda, Owen will be helping you with training. Don't let his goofiness fool you. He's actually a decent firearms instructor."
"I certainly could use another hand," she said.
"And you'll be adding three undercover federal agents to your class," Earl added. I believe that Esmeralda actually groaned louder than Holly had about the elves. Apparently the Seattle team leader got along with the government as well as everyone else at MHI. "Yeah, I know. Just pretend they aren't here."
"Damn Feds, on my property," the Boss murmured. I swear that if he wasn't such a gentleman, he would have spit on the floor. The government paid a large portion of the bills through PUFF, but that didn't mean we had to enjoy working with their Hunters.
"Can I at least be extra mean to them?" Esmeralda asked.
Harbinger smiled that predatory way only werewolves can. "But of course."
"I've got just the thing." Esmeralda grinned back. "Milo, we'll need some more cow entrails for another Gut Crawl tomorrow. It wouldn't be fair if our late arrivals missed out on that."
"I don't have anything fresh," Milo stated.
"Even better…"
Chapter 5
I settled into a routine over the next few days. Whenever I was working at the compound, I slept in a small room on the top floor directly across from Julie's temporary room. Some of Harbinger's team had their own homes off site, mostly in nearby Cazador, but I had been living at the old Shackleford family estate, or at least I had until Earl had decreed it was safer for me to stay here. The routine started early; Esmeralda and her Hunters had the Newbies up and running by six. I'd shower and head downstairs for breakfast where, inevitably, Agent Franks was sitting in a chair at the base of the stairs waiting for me. We had assigned him a private room, but as of yet, I was unaware if he had actually used it. The giant apparently never slept, and if he did, I was willing to bet it was with one eye open. Each morning since we'd gotten back he had been in the exact same spot, in a folding chair stolen from the cafeteria, back against the wall, waiting. And each morning, he would just nod at me when I would appear, as if he had heard me long before I had come down, and had been waiting patiently.
Franks had gone incognito. After the first day, I had pointed out that if he was supposedly some sort of liaison, he probably wouldn't be wandering around wearing his full suit of armor, with his assault rifle slung on his back, and what looked like about fifty pounds of ancillary gear. Apparently, he had agreed. So now Franks was in his other uniform, a cheap black suit, with a black clip-on tie, and a white dress shirt that had never been intended to be buttoned around a neck as thick as his. I had spotted him carrying at least two full-size Glocks, and I was guessing he had a grenade in each coat pocket, but for Franks, that was real low profile.
"Mornin', Sunshine," I said sarcastically, inwardly wishing that he would just go away.
He glowered for a moment, apparently impatient that nothing had tried to murder me yet. He adjusted the grenades in his pockets, checked his clip-on, and stood. As usual, Franks didn't have much to say. I started for the cafeteria, Franks trailing sullenly a few feet behind.
Today was going to be much like yesterday. After breakfast, I needed to catch up on paperwork, then I was supposed to run the range and teach the Newbies how to shoot better-hopefully at the targets and not at each other by accident, which got harder to do as the exercises got more complicated. Esmeralda had me doing that for most of the day.
"Any new intel from your people?" I asked Agent Franks over breakfast. We were alone in the large cafeteria. The Newbie class was out on their run, and Harbinger's team were mostly still working on the jobs he had assigned to them. I knew that Trip, Holly, and Milo had road-tripped it to Corinth yesterday to shake down the elves at the Enchanted Forest Trailer Park. Lucky them.
"No," he said sullenly over a mouthful of bacon. Franks chewed with his mouth open. Loudly.
"Any idea when this cult might make their move?"
"No."
"Think they're scared because I'm here?"
He shrugged.
"Anything interesting happen last night?"
"No."
Being by nature the kind of person who is uncomfortable with long silences, I kept trying. "If we're going to be hanging out, we might as well get to know each other some. I've known you for a while now." I didn't need to mention that our first meeting had been with him pointing a gun at my head, and our second had involved him beating the ever-living hell out of me. "And I don't even know what your first name is."
He didn't respond for a long time. "Agent."
So much for being friendly. "So, Agent, got any hobbies? Chia Pet farm? Collect Pokemon cards?"
I could feel the disdain. The power-lifter veins in his forehead bulged slightly as I annoyed him. "No."
That was pretty much the same as every other conversation I'd had with Franks. Apparently the government had not issued him a personality. The man was a hulking, violent, silent enigma. I sighed, and went back to the routine.
My office was on the top floor. I suppose that it was technically the Monster Hunter International Finance Department, but that seemed a bit pretentious a title for just me and a computer with Quickbooks Pro installed on it. I guess that I was the interim finance department, since I'd finally talked Earl into hiring a full-time bookkeeper, but I'd been too busy to follow up on it, so in the meantime, it was all me.
The accounting for MHI wasn't nearly as complicated as my old job. I managed to mostly keep everything up to date between missions. Before I'd come on it had been a real mess. Apparently killing and math were mutually exclusive skill sets for most people, but I'd gotten the books cleaned up. I'd steered us through an IRS audit a few months ago and that had been almost as hard as defeating Lord Machado.
The books were rough. I wasn't exactly proud of the General Ledger, but that was the beauty of being a privately held company. There were no shareholders to make happy and none of that awful SarbOx nonsense that big corporations had to deal with. Most of our money came from PUFF and they always paid on time. The hardest part was trying to track the expenses, since the various teams threw bags of money around in the course of completing their missions, and all of them were better at destruction than reliably e-mailing me their expense reports.
The stack of invoices had grown fat since I'd left for Mexico. As usual, the other Hunters couldn't be bothered to file anything correctly, and it all tended to just get dumped into one big pile right in the middle of my desk. This was going to take forever to book. The top sheet was labeled Project Leviathan in red Sharpie. "Crap, Milo, ten thousand dollars for custom-machined harpoons? How many of those things do you need?" I muttered as I tossed the invoice aside. I had one expense account titled "Milo." It was filled with weird items.